Word: mayoring
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...comets and more. With all that, you wouldn't think you could generate much buzz by announcing that astronomers had spotted a few dozen more bodies whirling about out there. But a buzz is just what was created yesterday at a meeting in Nantes, France, when Swiss astronomer Michel Mayor of the Geneva Observatory reported that he and his team had discovered 45 previously unknown planets orbiting a handful of nearby stars. There's good reason for all the excitement...
...Mayor himself was the one who spotted that first exotic world, and in the years since, he and other investigators have counted about 270 more. But land in the cosmic exurbs is decidedly inhospitable. Almost all of the newly discovered planets were huge, hot and gassy, Jupiter-like bodies lying scaldingly close to their suns. There might have been smaller, pleasanter Earth-like planets out there, but the equipment just didn't exist to spot the tinier telltale wobbles they would cause. Now it does - and it's delivered the goods...
...Thanks to the evocatively named High-Accuracy Radial-Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), a telescope mounted atop La Scilla Mountain in Chile, Mayor and his team were able to detect a litter of new planets, some as small as four times the mass of Earth - tiny by exoplanet standards. One star, just 42 light-years away, is home to a trio of such worlds - which Mayor is now calling "super-Earths." The largest of the three is just 9.5 times as big as Earth, the smallest just 4.2 times. It was not only the modest size of all the new worlds...
...Having sat in the studio with him, I can only say that he was a gentleman when the 'on air' light was lit as well as when it was not." - Former New York City Mayor Giuliani...
...even the harrowing fight about extending the pre-charge detention period for terror suspects is far from over. The debate is likely to surface during campaigning ahead of a by-election scheduled for June 26 in Henley, to fill the seat vacated by London's new Conservative mayor Boris Johnson. The morning after the terror vote, the Conservatives' shadow Home Secretary, David Davis, announced he is resigning his parliamentary seat to trigger a by-election in his constituency in northeastern England. He says he will use the poll to fight Labour on the erosion of civil liberties. Meanwhile...